- Neeson tells his daughter (Kim Mills) how much he cares in Taken 3.
Near the start of Taken 3, Liam Neeson’s perpetually unlucky ex-CIA operative Bryan Mills tries to show his college-aged daughter how “unpredictable” her old man can be by showing up at her apartment a few days before her birthday to present her with her gift. It is a giant stuffed panda. Even the filmmakers acknowledge how stupid this is—in fact, they can’t seem to acknowledge it enough, milking this awkward display of affection for maybe a half-dozen unfunny one-liners. It’s the filmic equivalent of a band vamping on the same several bars of a song before the front man appears onstage—the movie has to do something before Neeson gets into trouble and starts kicking ass. And, hey, who doesn’t like pandas?
At times the Neeson character suggests a pulp-fiction version of the enervated 60-something men in Tsai Ming-liang’s The River, Michael Mann’s The Insider, or Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner—old-fashioned, well-meaning patriarchs fighting the suspicion they’ve outgrown their use. Perhaps the Neeson character feels a bit of relief when some life-or-death conflict arises, as it allows him to be in his element again. If so, the Neeson myth also serves as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. “There’s a comfort-food quality to watching Neeson desperately loping across the screen yet again,” Nick Pinkerton recently wrote for Film Comment‘s website, “though all the razzle-dazzle cutting in the world can’t imbue him with the appearance of gazelle-like speed.”
